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Chapter 10 - 1989: Collapse of Communism, End of the Cold War

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Synthesis: 1989: the Collapse of Communism and the End of the Cold War

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The year 1989 has become a symbol of revolution in much the same way that 1789 has, and if the fall of the Bastille in Paris epitomizes the French Revolution, the collapse of the Berlin Wall defines the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of communism in Europe. If anything, the events of 1989 were even more startling than those of 200 years before. Over just 6 months, communist governments were swept out of power in all of Eastern Europe and a few years after that, out of the Soviet Union as well. After 40 years of division, Germany was reunified and Eastern Europe began its march to the West. The Cold War was over. The speed and scale of these changes are remarkable given the rigidity and solidity of the Soviet bloc since World War II. Although resistance and dissent had occurred in Eastern Europe over the years, any significant challenges or changes were crushed by Moscow. After the early 1970s, however, the legitimacy of the Eastern European communist governments was eroded by economic stagnation and the growth of a “civil society.” When Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet Party leader in 1985 and called for “restructuring” of the communist states, wittingly or unwittingly, he unleashed these forces for change. As reform spiralled into revolution, Gorbachev himself fell from power as the Soviet Union fell apart. With the dissolution of the USSR, fifteen new independent states emerged, and as after the Napoleonic wars and the two world wars, the map of Europe was redrawn. In both Eastern Europe and most of the states of the former Soviet Union, governments were reconstituted as democracies and economic systems as capitalist. Many of these states tried to reorient themselves away from Russia and toward Western Europe, and almost all of them applied for membership in either NATO or the European Union. Europe was no longer divided.



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Before 1989: Soviet Hegemony, the Brezhnev Doctrine and the

Helsinki Accords

After World War II, the Soviet Union established a tightly integrated and

controlled alliance of communist states in Eastern Europe, which were

referred to in the West as Soviet satellites, or the Soviet bloc. These

states (East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and

Romania) all had essentially one single dominant political party, the

Communist Party, and a centrally planned and state-owned economy.

Their foreign trade was mostly with each other and the Soviet Union and

they all belonged to the Moscow-dominated military alliance, the Warsaw

Pact.



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Albania and Yugoslavia, neither of which bordered on the Soviet Union,

also had communist systems but were neither subservient to Moscow

nor members of the Warsaw Pact.

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While Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, there was little room for

dissent, opposition, or differentiation in Eastern Europe: All of the

governments there followed the Soviet model. With Stalin’s death in

1953, some relaxation of control occurred both within the Soviet Union

and in Eastern Europe and some countries were able to carve out niches

of limited autonomy for themselves.

Poland, for example, was allowed to maintain independent, private

farming in the countryside and to keep open its many Roman Catholic

churches and seminaries.

Romania, while keeping tight internal controls, was able to maintain a

relatively independent foreign policy, although it remained a member of

the Warsaw Pact.

There were, however, strict limits to how far the Eastern European states

could stray from the Soviet path, and when it seemed to Moscow that

communist rule or bloc solidarity was threatened, it would use

intimidation or force to set things right.

After the death of Stalin, for example, the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev (in power 1953-1964), began a program of “de-Stalinization” of the Soviet Union, resulting in the release of many political prisoners, restrictions on the secret police, and relaxation of censorship.



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In Eastern Europe, these changes were taken as license for reform. In

1956, in Poland, workers’ demonstrations and strikes forced a change in

leadership in that country and the installation of a more national-minded

Communist Party leader, who assured Moscow that the country would

remain communist.

That same year in Hungary, young people toppled the huge statue of

Stalin in the centre of Budapest, and a reformist leadership declared the

country neutral and tried to withdraw Hungary from the Warsaw Pact.

This went beyond the permissible limits for the Kremlin (the Soviet

leadership), which ordered a military intervention to crush the rebellion.

Thousands of Hungarians were killed, and several hundred thousand

fled into exile.

The next serious challenge to Moscow’s hegemony in Eastern Europe

came from Czechoslovakia in 1968. There, a liberalizing Communist

Party leader named Alexander Dubcek spoke about creating “socialism

with a human face.” The Communist Party’s reform program attacked the

concentration of power in the party and proposed freedom of the press,

assembly and travel. The Soviet leadership, now under Leonid

Brezhnev, cautioned the Czechoslovaks to rein in the reform, and when

they were unable to do so, Moscow led an invasion of 750,000 Warsaw

Pact troops to “normalize” the country. The Prague Spring came to an

early end in the face of Soviet tanks.

The Soviet leadership (Leonid Brezhnev, in power 1964-1982) justified

the invasion by arguing that if socialism was in jeopardy in any

communist state, this constituted a threat to all socialist states and thus

required action by the entire socialist community.

The Brezhnev Doctrine, as it was dubbed in the West, gave Moscow

the right to intervene in any country in the bloc to prevent the

deterioration of Communist Party control.



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The Brezhnev Doctrine cast a shadow over Eastern Europe for the next

decade but did not deter the Poles from periodic bouts of strikes and

unrest. Poland had a tradition of revolt, often against the Russians, that

dated back to the 18th century era of “the Partitions”, when the Polish

state was gobbled up by its three powerful neighbours, Russia, Prussia,

and Austria. This tradition continued even after the consolidation of

communist power, with demonstrations, strikes, or riots in 1956, 1968,

1970 and 1976.

The most powerful challenge to communist rule came in Poland in the

summer of 1980, when workers went on strike to protest food price

increases. At the huge Lenin Shipyards in the coastal city of Gdansk

(formerly the German city of Danzig), a shipyard electrician named Lech

Wałesa assumed leadership of the strike committee, which represented

and coordinated strike activity at over two hundred enterprises. The

workers forced the government to agree to their list of 21 demands,

which included the formation of their own trade union, independent of the

Communist Party. The workers named the union Solidarnosc

(Solidarity). Over the next 16 months, some 12 million people (out of a

total workforce of 16 million) joined Solidarity.

The position of Solidarity was strengthened further with the moral

support of Pope John Paul II, the first Polish pope, who had been elected

just two years before. With practically universal support in the country,

the union became more and more powerful, and increasingly challenged

the authority of the Communist Party.

This raised concern in the Soviet leadership, which several times staged

military manoeuvres along the Polish borders. Finally, under pressure

from the Kremlin, in December 1981, the Polish government declared

martial law, arrested Wałesa and the rest of the Solidarity leadership,

and banned the union. This seemed to be yet another affirmation of the

Brezhnev Doctrine.



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But in Poland, the situation and results were different from those in

Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Firstly, the Soviet army hadn’t intervened directly, maybe from fear

of massive Polish national resistance to the use of Soviet troops.

Second, the martial law abolition of Solidarity was not entirely

effective. The union was reconstituted as an illegal underground

organization and continued its activities in organizing strikes and

demonstrations and publishing newsletters.

Most important, however, was the legacy of Solidarity. Adam

Michnik, a Solidarity adviser; observed that Solidarity had existed

long enough to convince everyone that, after martial law, it was no

longer possible to envision “socialism with a human face.” “What

remains,” he wrote, “is communism with its teeth knocked out.”

Mass protests, like those of Solidarity in the 1980s, shook the regimes of

Eastern Europe. But the protest and dissent had begun a decade earlier

in the region. As the economies and the regimes began to weaken in the

1970s, dissident groups became more active, visible, and popular.

This was stimulated in part by the 1975 signing of the Helsinki Accords

by the governments of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. These

documents, the result of a long process of negotiations among 35 states

in Europe plus the United States and Canada, contained a whole section

on “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the

freedom of thought, conscience, religion, or belief.”

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After the agreements were signed by their governments, dissident

intellectuals in both the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe formed human

rights monitoring groups to publicize their governments’ violations of the

rights they had been guaranteed at Helsinki. Often, these were illegal

underground publications (called samizdat in the Soviet Union), but

some were published openly and defiantly, complete with the names and

addresses of the signatories.

In Czechoslovakia, a group of intellectuals openly circulated a

document entitled Charter 77, which called on people to speak out on

behalf of human rights guaranteed by Czechoslovak laws and the

Helsinki Accords. The playwright Václav Havel was the spokesman for

Charter 77; 12 years later, Havel became one of the leaders of the

revolution that brought down the communist government of

Czechoslovakia.

Gorbachev and Perestroika

Probably these popular protests and dissident activities would have

gotten nowhere had it not been for a change of leadership in the Soviet

Union. In 1982, Leonid Brezhnev died at the age of seventy-six, after

eighteen years as leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

His next two successors, also elderly, died within a few years, and in

1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was chosen Communist Party leader.

http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/gor0bio-1

At fifty-four, Gorbachev was by far the youngest member of the Soviet

leadership, the first party leader born after the Russian Revolution, and

the first to begin his political career after the death of Stalin. He was also

educated (with a law degree), articulate, and charismatic. Almost

immediately, he began to push for a whole series of increasingly radical

reforms, both economic and political.



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1. The core of the reform program was what Gorbachev called

perestroika, or “economic restructuring.” After years of rapid

economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet economy had

been growing at only about 2 percent annually for a decade. The

rigid system of state control and central planning no longer

functioned well in a complex and global economy. Internal

problems were compounded in the 1980s by a sharp decline in

world prices for petroleum, a major source of export earnings for

the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the long and costly Cold War arms

race with the United States was an increasing drain on economic

resources. What were the economic problems perestroika

addressed?

These economic problems had a deleterious effect on living standards in

the USSR. Even the official press admitted that the Soviet Union ranked

between fiftieth and sixtieth of the world’s countries in per capita

consumption of goods and services.

Gorbachev recognized that the legitimacy and stability of the Soviet

regime (and other communist regimes) was increasingly dependent on

economic success and consumer satisfaction and that a more efficient

economy required commitment, hard work, and support from the

population. As he himself put it, “A house can be put in order only by a

person who feels he is the owner.”

Perestroika, then, involved making a number of liberalizing changes to

the economic system without ever abandoning socialism. Central

planning was scaled back, allowing for more decision making at the

factory level. Small-scale private and cooperative firms could operate

independently of government planning. The government allowed some

limited role for the free market in agriculture as well.

What changes were made because of perestroika?

2. In his effort to revitalize the Soviet system, Gorbachev linked

perestroika with glasnost, meaning “openness” or “publicity”, and

meant to open Soviet society to a critical evaluation of its past and

present problems.



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Censorship was relaxed, and previously taboo subjects began to receive

coverage: joblessness, drug abuse, prostitution, crime, urban blight,

homelessness, and so forth.

The campaign for glasnost was accompanied by the democratization of

the political system, which included the introduction of multicandidate

(although not multiparty) elections, the sanctioning of independent

groups and associations, improved relations with the Russian Orthodox

Church and a reduction in the dominating role of the Communist Party.

These changes did not create Western-style democracy in the Soviet

Union, but they were steps in that direction.

What changes did glasnost inspire?

3. A final element of Gorbachev’s reforms was “new thinking” in

foreign policy. The basis of change was to develop an economy

that was more efficient and more oriented toward consumer goods.

It needed to expand trade, attract technology, reduce military

spending, and cut back on aid to other countries all of which

required a more relaxed international atmosphere and an improved

relationship with the United States.

Gorbachev moved in this direction by introducing several major arms-

control proposals, reducing Soviet defence spending, pulling back troops

stationed in Eastern Europe and beginning to disengage from

Afghanistan (where the Soviets had been fighting Islamic mujahidin since

1979). How did Gorbachev change foreign policy?

As Soviet policies toward the rest of the world changed, so did the

Kremlin’s orientation toward Eastern Europe, the region of primary

economic, strategic, and ideological importance to Moscow. Hoping to

make the Eastern European economies more efficient and less

dependent on the Soviet Union, Gorbachev made a series of visits to the

Eastern European capitals to push those countries toward their own

perestroika. He also backed away from the principles of the Brezhnev

Doctrine, stressing “the right of every people to choose the paths and

forms of its own development.” All of this strengthened the hands of

reformers in the region and led to increasing demands for change. This

time, it seemed, Moscow would not block reform in Eastern Europe.



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The Revolutions of 1989

The first test of Moscow’s new thinking came from Poland. Since the

martial law crackdown on Solidarity in 1981, Poland had muddled along

in political stalemate and economic stagnation. The government had

lifted martial law in 1983 and released Lech Walesa, but he remained

officially a “nonperson.” In 1988, a new round of price hikes sparked

worker protests and strikes. At first, the strikers’ demands were largely

economic, but they expanded to include calls for political change and the

legalization of Solidarity.

The government turned to Walesa to end the strikes, during a series of

roundtable negotiations with representatives of the government, the

Catholic Church, and Solidarity. The negotiations ended in April 1989,

with a path-breaking set of agreements that provided for the

reinstatement of Solidarity and for parliamentary elections in which

Solidarity could put up candidates against the communist incumbents.

At the signing ceremony of this pact, Walesa proclaimed, “This is the

beginning of democracy and a free Poland.”

The elections were scheduled for early June, just two months later. The

Solidarity-led opposition was at a disadvantage, trying to transform itself

from illegal underground to legal electoral contestant. Nevertheless, in

June, the opposition won almost every single seat it was allowed to

contest. With this unexpected turn of events, the Communist Party no

longer commanded a majority in the parliament. In August, a coalition

government was formed under Tadeusz Mazowiecki, an attorney, editor,

and Solidarity supporter.

For the first time since 1948, a non-communist government held power in

Eastern Europe. This was a blunt challenge to the principles of the

Brezhnev Doctrine, but all through these events, the Kremlin looked on

quietly and even with approval. That summer, a Gorbachev spokesman

jokingly referred to Moscow’s new “Sinatra Doctrine.” This referred to

Frank Sinatra’s song “My Way” and implied that the Soviet satellites

would now be allowed to go their own way. The next year, Lech Walesa

was elected president of Poland. The Brezhnev Doctrine was dead.

The Polish Round Table negotiations and elections opened the

floodgates of reform in the rest of the Soviet bloc.

In Hungary, the government and the opposition entered into Polish-style

negotiations on the future of the country. Within a few months, they had



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agreed on constitutional reform, a multiparty system, and free

parliamentary elections in 1990. By the fall of 1989, the Hungarian

Communist Party was dissolved, and the word “People’s” had been

dropped from the name “Hungarian People’s Republic.” Hungary opened

its borders with the West, with a ceremonial cutting of the barbed wire

barrier on the Austrian border. Hungary then became a funnel, through

which thousands of Eastern Europeans travelled, on their way to the

West. East Germans, in particular, now had a way around the Berlin

Wall, and tens of thousands fled to the West.

http://germany.alphare.net/propMarket.php In East Germany, a hard-line communist leadership under Erich

Honecker had resisted Soviet-style reforms. But tensions came to a head

in October 1989, as a result of two circumstances: the popular exodus

through Hungary and other countries, which had reached almost two

hundred thousand people by then, and the visit to Berlin by Gorbachev.

The Honecker government had at first allowed some East Germans to

travel to West Germany through other countries but then clamped down.

The new restrictions led to protests and demonstrations in East Berlin,

Dresden, Leipzig, and other cities.

At this time, Gorbachev came to East Berlin to participate in the country’s

fortieth anniversary celebrations. Wherever he went, he was greeted by

chants of “Gorby! Gorby!” and the police had to break up several

demonstrations and protests. After his departure, the demonstrations

grew larger and more political, reaching 300,000 in Leipzig and 500,000

in East Berlin. Demands were made for free emigration, the resignation

of Honecker, and the legalization of a political opposition.

In the first few days of November, the entire government resigned and so

did the Communist Party’s leadership. As the government weakened and

travel restrictions were eased, people poured out of the country.



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Finally, on November 9, 1989, the government ended all travel

restrictions, and the Berlin Wall was opened. Young people stormed the

wall, chopped at it with pickaxes and celebrated with champagne. That

day was the beginning of the end for East Germany. Over the next

months, the Communist Party made an effort to reform and to

democratize itself, as was happening in Hungary and Poland.

The country’s parliament voted to end the communists’ leading role and

promised free elections in the spring of 1990. By then, a flood tide was

under way, from both East and West, for the unification of the two

Germanys. East Germany disappeared on October 3, 1990, absorbed

into a reunified Germany less than a year after the collapse of the Berlin

Wall.

The turmoil in East Germany in October and November of 1989 spilled over into neighbouring Czechoslovakia.

As huge demonstrations in the capital city, Prague, demanded political

change, Václav Havel, members of Charter 77 and other opposition

groups, put together the Civic Forum to coordinate the protests and to

demand the resignation of the Communist Party leadership.

On November 24, after 350,000 people had gathered in Prague’s Wenceslas Square to cheer Alexander Dubcek (the hero of 1968) and Václav Havel, the entire party leadership resigned.

A new leadership agreed to the formation of a coalition government, free

elections, and freer travel to the West. The communists had bowed out

without a fight, and Czechoslovaks exalted over their Velvet Revolution.

As Havel claimed, with only slight exaggeration, the revolution had taken

ten years in Poland, ten months in Hungary, ten weeks in East Germany,

but only ten days in Czechoslovakia. In December 1989, Václav Havel

became president of Czechoslovakia.



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In the course of just six months, from June through December of 1989, communist governments fell in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania.

Only in Romania did the revolution turn violent. There, over the course

of just ten days, more than a thousand people were killed in the uprising,

culminating in the execution of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu

and his wife, on Christmas day.

Remarkably, with that lone exception, all other East European

revolutions occurred peacefully. Never before in history had so many

countries undergone revolutionary changes in such a short time. Some

were managed by Reformist Party leadership, as in Hungary; some by

“people power,” as in East Germany and Czechoslovakia; and some by a

combination of the two, as in Poland and Bulgaria. Regimes that were

considered well entrenched and well protected simply tumbled, one after

another, into the “dustbin of history” (a phrase Marx had used to describe

the fate of capitalist states).

Within two years, communism collapsed in the Soviet Union itself.

The Disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia

Nationalism and liberalism played a big part in bringing democracy and

sovereignty to the Eastern European states in 1989, and they also

contributed to the disintegration of the two multinational states of the

region, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

In the Soviet Union, the changes that Gorbachev had unleashed in

Eastern Europe came boomeranging back to the country where they

started. The USSR was a union of fifteen “republics,” each representing

a different nationality, many of which were brought forcibly into the

Russian Empire before 1917 or into the Soviet Union afterwards. As

centralizing controls were weakened during the Gorbachev era,

nationalism flourished in all of them. When the Eastern European states

broke away from communism and the Soviet bloc in 1989, many of the

Soviet republics saw similar opportunities.



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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Curtain

In the course of 1990 and 1991, every one of the fifteen republics declared independence, although Moscow did not recognize those declarations. In the spring and summer of 1991, Gorbachev and the leaders of a number of the republics, including Boris Yeltsin (Russian Republic President, 1991-1999), attempted to hammer out a formula to create a more decentralized union with greater autonomy for each of the republics.

Shortly before the treaty was to be signed in August, though, a hard-line

group representing the Communist Party, the army, and the security

agencies attempted to oust Gorbachev from power. Boris Yeltsin

managed to rally opposition to the coup and face down the plotters. But,

in the aftermath of the coup attempt, the country’s fragmentation

accelerated. At the end of the year, Yeltsin and the presidents of Ukraine

and Belarus signed a treaty formally dissolving the USSR. Gorbachev

resigned and retired. After 72 years, the Soviet Union was no more.

Yugoslavia, like the USSR, was a multinational federal state held

together by a single political party, the League of Yugoslav Communists.

With a total population of only 24 million, it was an extraordinarily

heterogeneous country with no majority population. The Serbs were the

largest group, but they constituted only about 1/3 of the total. As

communism disintegrated in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union,

Yugoslavia also began to fall apart. Elections in Yugoslavia’s republics in

1990 brought non-socialist and independence-minded governments to

power in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia.



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http://www.icty.org/en/about/what-former-yugoslavia

But the government of Serbia, under President Slobodan Milosevic´, remained committed to maintaining the integrity of the state under predominantly Serbian influence.

Serbia clashed at first with both Slovenia and Croatia, but the biggest

problem came in Bosnia, where about 43 percent of the population was

Muslim (from the days of Ottoman influence in the region) and a third

was Serbian. With the declaration of independence by the Bosnian

government, Serbian guerrillas, backed by Serbia and the Yugoslav

army, began seizing Bosnian territory for the creation of a Serbian state.

This led to a brutal and horrifying civil war that caused almost a quarter

of a million deaths, the worst violence in Europe since World War II.

Finally, after a two-week bombing campaign by NATO forces against

Serb positions, the parties were brought to the negotiating table in

Dayton, Ohio. The Dayton Accords of 1995 provided for a single Bosnian

state divided into two roughly equal entities: a Muslim-Croat federation

and a Serb republic. A NATO peacekeeping force of nearly sixty

thousand troops, including about twenty thousand Americans, monitored

the cease-fire and supervised implementation of the accord.

http://www.icty.org/en/about/what-former-yugoslavia



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When another round of conflict erupted between Serbs and Albanian

Muslims in the region of Kosovo in 1998, yet another military intervention

by NATO (primarily U.S.) forces was required. In 1992, Yugoslavia finally

disappeared altogether, fragmented into six small sovereign countries

that had been its constituent republics, in much the same way that the

Soviet Union had earlier collapsed.

Other problems of nationalism and ethnic conflict were unleashed with

the collapse of the centralizing power of communism.

Three years after the Velvet Revolution, Czechoslovakia was peacefully dissolved and replaced by two separate states: the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Russia, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, was itself a federation of

many nationalities and faced a separatist insurgency from the Muslim

region of Chechnya, where fighting continued from 1994-2011.

http://mic.com/articles/36619/russia-chechnya-conflict-a-quick-guide



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Nationalism, which had played a positive role in delivering Eastern

Europe from the Soviet bloc, also had its negative side, expressed in

ethnic rivalry, hostility, and conflict. With all these changes, the borders

of Eastern Europe were redrawn in a manner even more thoroughgoing

than after World War I, with the emergence of so many new states. From

the former USSR, all fifteen constituent republics became sovereign and

independent countries. Six new states, including Croatia, Slovenia,

Bosnia, and Serbia, emerged from Yugoslavia. Germany’s reunification

made it the most populous and economically powerful country in Europe.

All of these new countries, as well as the newly independent ones of

Eastern Europe, wrestled with questions of identity and their

relationships with the rest of Europe.

Transition from Communism to Market Democracy

The new post communist governments in Eastern Europe and the former

Soviet Union faced a daunting complex of tasks:

the re-creation of democratic politics,

the construction of market economies, and

a reorientation of foreign policy toward the West.

These changes required a fundamental transformation of each country’s

social and economic systems and even a psychological reorientation for

much of the population. In many respects, these changes turned out to

be more wrenching and traumatic than the relatively quick and painless

political revolutions.

Nevertheless, most of the Eastern European states made remarkably

speedy progress toward both democracy and capitalism. Within a few

years, most had been through several sets of free elections, had adopted

new constitutions, and had established representative legislatures,

competitive party politics, the rule of law and a free press. Some of them

had even voted back into power, in free elections, representatives of the

former communist parties!

In the economic realm, the task was not so smooth or easy. Dismantling

the old system of central planning and full employment disrupted almost

everyone’s life. Building a market economy based on private ownership,

entrepreneurship, and investments took time in countries without such

experience or traditions and without any capital.



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The tasks of economic restructuring included

price deregulation,

currency rationalization,

the elimination of government subsidies to consumers and

producers,

the creation of a modern banking system,

the creation of a stock market and

the creation of a large-scale program for the privatization of state

enterprises and farmland.

In both Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, all countries

experienced sharp economic declines in the early years of the transition,

with plummeting output, surges in unemployment, and skyrocketing

inflation. Russia’s problems were more severe than most, with an

economic depression that rivalled that of the Great Depression in the

United States and Germany during the 1930s. But, by about 1994, most

countries had begun to recover, the private sector was taking hold, and

consumer goods and services were more available. They were

increasingly looking like typical Western consumer societies.

The dawn of capitalism, though, brought with it the usual share of

problems.

Unemployment, which had been nearly nonexistent in the

communist era, reached near double-digit rates in many countries

at the end of the 1990s.

The number of people in the region living in poverty increased

tenfold between 1989 and 1996.

Increases in unemployment and poverty contributed to worsening

health indicators, especially in the countries of the former Soviet

Union, where mortality and morbidity rates were without peacetime

precedent.

There were also big increases in inequality. The growing gap

between rich and poor was particularly galling for many citizens

because many of the “nouveau riche” were their former

oppressors, members of the old Communist Party apparatus.

In many post communist countries in the 1990s, large percentages of the

populations expressed the view (in public opinion surveys) that they had

been better off in the communist era than they were in the democratic

one.



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Nevertheless, most people in the post communist states were glad to be

free of the restrictions and privations of the communist era and

welcomed the return of “normal lives” and the chance to rejoin Europe.

Most Eastern European countries reoriented their trade from East to

West and many citizens of the region took advantage of new

opportunities to travel to or work in Western Europe.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/natos-drive-towards-the-south-the-balkans-and-south-eastern-europe/5493874

With the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, most former members of that

alliance rushed to affiliate with NATO, an organization originally set up to

oppose communism, and by 2009, twelve of the twenty-eight members

of NATO were post communist countries.

The former communist states were even more anxious to join the European Union for both symbolic and economic reasons. Eight of them joined the EU in its 2004 expansion of membership, and two more in 2007. Croatia joined in 2013. Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania and Serbia, former Yugoslav Republics, have all applied for membership.



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Twenty years after the 1989 revolutions, almost all of the former

communist states had successfully navigated the path to democratic

politics and capitalist economics. What had been “Eastern Europe” was

thoroughly heterogeneous, with some people very wealthy and others

quite poor, but not too different in that respect from “Western Europe.”

Slovenia and the Czech Republic, for example, had overtaken the living

standards in Portugal, the poorest country in the western camp. Some of

the ex-communist countries had better credit ratings and less corruption

than some of the older EU members. The opening up of national borders

led to a flood of immigrants from east to west in Europe, boosting

economic growth but also compounding issues of immigration prompted

by decolonization a generation earlier.

Conclusions: the Impact of 1989

The causes of the 1989–1991 revolutions, like those of 1789, 1848, and

1917, were both systemic and immediate.

In the long term, the Soviet and Eastern European governments had

suffered declining economies; growing popular dissatisfaction, political

dissent, nationalism and declining legitimacy. Given the apparatus of

repression possessed by the communist governments, the system could

probably have limped along even with these disabilities but for the

appearance of Gorbachev, glasnost and perestroika.

Perestroika encouraged change and reform, and glasnost uncorked the

genie of public opinion. Once the masses took to the streets, political

changes could not be stopped without the use of force. Fortunately,

Gorbachev would not countenance using force. For this, he won the

1990 Nobel Peace Prize. The magnitude and speed of the revolutionary

changes were unprecedented: In the course of only two years, nine

authoritarian governments collapsed, and twice that many new states

were born out of the rubble.

In some ways, the breakup of the multinational states of the Soviet Union

and Yugoslavia and the reunification of Germany were a culmination of

the post–World War I process of creating nation-states, the goal

enunciated at that time so forcefully by President Woodrow Wilson in his

Fourteen Points. But, just as in that earlier time, when nationalism

proved to be double-edged, in the 1990s it showed its intolerant and

violent side in Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, Chechnya, and elsewhere.



162

Mostly, however, the anticommunist revolutions were peaceful, and this

was another remarkable aspect of 1989. Past revolutions, even ones that

had failed, had been violent to one degree or another. In Eastern

Europe, one country after another relied on “people power” to bring down

their governments without resort to arms. It seemed that even staunchly

authoritarian governments could not stand in the face of popular

disaffection publicly expressed.

This form of regime change became a model for other peoples and

countries as well, most notably in South Africa, which began its own form

of perestroika in 1989, leading to black majority-rule government.

The revolutions of 1989 did not simply destroy governments; they

also ended an ideology. Although communism may have come from

within Russia in 1917, it was imposed on Eastern Europe from without in

the years after World War II, and it never did take very well. (Stalin once

observed that “communism fits Poland like a saddle fits a cow.”) Although many

Eastern Europeans welcomed the communist governments at first, this

support waned over the years. By the 1980s, although many people

favoured socialism, hardly any supported Soviet-style communism. With

the overthrow of communist governments, the communist ideology also

faded. The end of communism in Europe also ended the Cold War.

The conflict between capitalism and communism had been an

important factor in European and world affairs since the Russian

Revolution of 1917 and had dominated international politics since World

War II. The ideological element in international politics faded away. One

U.S. State Department official, Francis Fukuyama, wrote an essay and a

book entitled “The End of History”, in which he proclaimed, “the end of

mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western

liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” This

assessment was simplistic and optimistic, but in the United States, it

reflected the view that the United States had won the Cold War.

There is no doubt, though, that the rise of liberal democracy in Eastern

Europe offered the best chance yet for a Europe “united and free.” From

the Baltic States through Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, to

Slovenia and Croatia, governments were committed to democracy,

market economies, and membership in the European Community. The

“iron curtain” had lifted, and if there was still a division in Europe, it was

much farther to the east.



163

Study Questions

1. What do the fall of the Bastille in Paris and the collapse of the

Berlin Wall epitomize? Compare the two maps of Europe in 1815

and during the Cold War. Which countries had changed? Which

countries were new?

2. Which countries were Soviet satellites as shown on the map of the

Cold War?

3. Which two countries also had communist systems but were neither

subservient to Moscow or nor members of the Warsaw Pact?

4. Which two communist Soviet bloc countries had limited freedoms

and what were they?

5. What program did Nikita Khrushchev begin? What did it involve?

6. What was the Brezhnev Doctrine and where did it express itself?

When, where and how did it end?

7. Explain the origins, troubles and results of the organization known

as Solidarity in Poland.

8. What were the Helsinki Accords and were they effective?

9. What was Charter 77? Where was it applied?

10. Describe Mikhail Gorbachev. What were his three main

ideas? Why were they necessary for Russia at that time?

11. Which country followed Poland in rebellion? What did this

lead to?

12. How did the Honecker government react to this rebellion?

13. When did the Berlin Wall fall? When did East Germany

disappear?

14. What happened in Czechoslovakia in 1989?

15. Where was the revolution the most violent? How did it end?

16. Describe the dissolution of Yugoslavia.

17. Explain the transition from communism to market democracy

in terms of the social and economic challenges.

18. What happened to the Warsaw Pact, NATO and the EU after

the revolution of 1989?

19. How was the revolution of 1989 a culmination of the post–

World War I process of creating nation-states? What did these

revolutions rely on?

20. Which ideology did this historical period destroy and how?



164

Vocabulary Words:

1. epitomize

2. wittingly or unwittingly

3. hegemony

4. subservient to

5. carve out

6. stray

7. topple

8. to rein in

9. in jeopardy

10. dubbed

11. bout

12. gobble up

13. on behalf of

14. compounded by

15. deleterious

16. scale back

17. urban blight

18. muddle along

19. stalemate

20. price hike

21. spark

22. blunt

23. floodgates, a flood tide

24. funnel

25. come to a head



165

26. clamp down

27. turmoil

28. spilled over

29. bowed out

30. exalt

31. entrench

32. hammer out

33. oust

34. aftermath

35. clash

36. unleash

37. thoroughgoing

38. constituent

39. wrestle

40. daunting

41. wrenching

42. disrupt

43. plummeting

44. skyrocketing

45. morbidity

46. galling

47. uncorked

48. double-edged

49. wane

50. fade away



166

Václav Havel, Frank Zappa, and the Velvet Revolution

In the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as in tsarist Russia in the

nineteenth century, the ban on opposition parties or organizations meant

that writers, artists, and intellectuals played an important political role.

One of the most prominent dissident intellectuals in Eastern Europe was

the playwright Václav Havel. In his twenties, he took a job as a

stagehand at Prague’s ABC Theater and began writing plays himself.

During the more open period of the Prague Spring in 1968, he travelled

to the United States, where he identified with the 1960s counterculture,

especially rock music. After the Soviet intervention put an end to the

Czechoslovak reforms in August 1968, the new hard-line government in

Prague banned Havel’s plays, arrested him several times, and jailed him

twice. In 1977, the government arrested and tried a popular

Czechoslovak rock band called The Plastic People of the Universe,

named after lyrics in a song by American rocker Frank Zappa. In protest

of the trial, a number of Czechoslovak artists and intellectuals signed a

manifesto for artistic and political freedom, which they called Charter 77.

This became a kind of floating intellectual protest organization, with

Havel as the spokesman. Havel formulated his ideas about resistance to

tyranny in an important 1969 essay, “The Power of the Powerless,”

which later became a book. He argued there that a totalitarian political

system is built on lies and that people allow the system to exist by

accepting the lies and living within them. The only moral solution to and

way out of totalitarianism is for individuals to reject the lies and “to live

within the truth.”Havel’s essay, published illegally in Czechoslovakia and

other Eastern European countries, was widely influential and became, in

essence, a blueprint for what happened in 1989. With the fall of

communism in Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, Václav Havel

became the president of the country (and remained so until 2003). As

president, he brought Frank Zappa to Czechoslovakia, told him his music

had helped inspire their revolution, and offered him a job as special

ambassador to the West for trade, culture, and tourism which the

American Secretary of State refused to allow.

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